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I am guessing most of you have never heard this concerto before. Luckily, there is a live performance of all three movements on YouTube. The orchestra is a community orchestra, with uneven playing, but I really like the soloist (Dr. Neil Galanter). I think this is a very exciting work, and I think most who respond favorably to the music of Prokofieff and Shostakovich will like this concerto as well.

The Belgian composer Marcel Poot, born in Vilvoorde, Brussels on 7 May 1901. From 1939, he held various positions at the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, heading that institution from 1949 until 1966. He was one of the most remarkable musical personalities of his generation of Belgian composers, and left behind an extensive selection of mainly instrumental works for orchestra and chamber ensembles. He died in 1988.

Marcel Poot’s lively and spirited style of composition reveals youthful mischievousness and an uninhibited lust for life, expressed in lively rhythms and often short melodic themes. Poot’s music is seldom backed by deep thoughts, but the refined musical taste of the composer protects him from superficiality by an innate sense of balance in the formal build-up of his works, which as a rule are classical in structure. Poot’s modernism was never dogmatic, but a spontaneous synthesis of old and new, averse to systems and experiments. This is why Poot is in many ways a neo-classicist, even though he never admitted to this or any other style of composition. His preference for classically from schemes is derived from his respect for the important traditions of West European art-music of the past, while the pulse of his own age beats in clearly chiseled and tersely formulated themes. Thematic work and motivistic analysis of these often starkly contrasting elements dictates to him a logical extension of the musical idea, brusquely expressed in biting rhythms and muscular ostinatos. Poot’s music is mostly abstract, without reference to extra-musical content of meaning, and it emerges, as it were, from the logic of strictly personal musical imagination.[/b]

I contacted the piano soloist in the YouTube performance, and he told me that there has only been one commercial recording of the Concerto before but that it is no longer in print. So the YouTube performance is it.

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She was with me even in my grave When the last of my friends turned away, And she sang like the first storm heaven gave.Or as if flowers were having their say.